Murmur Page 14

  “Why are you so different, Daddy?”

  I tell her something she half-knows, because she’s still a part of me.

  “Because outside, I had my body changed against my will”—I feel her next to me, shifting uncomfortably—“and that has altered what I took to be my mind.”

  She doesn’t look at me but at my reflection. They’re slowing down, the hectic images. Now I am quite reliably, consistently human, and it is just a question of which one, this one, or that.

  “When I was changed—treated—I found out two odd things. One was a source of mild comfort. I found that I could still be me, somewhere inside my head, when I was physically changing. The other was quite horrible and no comfort at all: when I began to look better, like my old self, after the changing treatment stopped, I seemed to disappear from the inside. I felt as if I’d been replaced. I heard myself saying to everyone how well I felt, how everything was on the up …”

  “That wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t feel that everything …”

  “No. I did not.”

  “You were lying!”

  “Ah, no. Not even that. I felt I still knew, in some way, what had been done to me, but there was now another me, speaking for me, out of my altered or remodeled shape, who mindlessly agreed with everything the doctors said.”

  “He wasn’t you.”

  “He wasn’t me. I’d always thought that, in my line of work, a thing that acts like something, must be it, someone who behaves plausibly is plausibly the product of their behaviors. But I was wrong. You can be changed—tortured, in fact—so that the person other people go on talking to just isn’t you. You’ve gone away. Your body’s holding wide the door, but you are in a very different dark chamber.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in my room.”

  “And where am I?”

  “You’re moving into yours.”

  We have been holding hands, but now she lets her arms fall to her sides and looks squarely, contentedly, at what she sees in the mirror. The noisy agitations of the Fair go on outside. At the periphery of my vision, I catch the huddle of others, species and forms, in the doorway, waiting to see this attraction.

  This quite extraordinary daughter of mine.

  I hear her say, “Where have you gone?” and I reply:

  It is a singulare tantum, love, the room of life, but everybody’s furniture is different, and none of us remembers where it came from, though we deeply sense it’s held in trust. Our room is everything to us, the inner and the outer world, the universe and every possible inflection of nature, sensation, period, and thought.

  And yet the loss of it, to each of us in turn, will not matter that much, because, strangely, it is the knowledge there are other rooms, or rather tenants of this room, the lives of others from a future quite unknown to us, continuing beyond our grasp, that gives the room its shape. It is a bounty built from scarcity. We have it once, and that limit, material mortality, gives what I do, the work I wrestle with, the friends I love, the fears I feel, meaning.

  The more we value what goes on in spite of our loss to ourselves—the more we seek the survival of afterlives not ours—the more life means. Now comes to mean the whole of time, the seen and the unseen.

  You are my afterlife, my work, and I need you to go on after me.

  I think your version of the room will be large, shape-shifting. I think that you will often feel you pass unnoticed as a force, that what you are is always overlooked. We will transistorize ourselves and make you stare quite hard at our reflections, hoping you will be an improvement—on age, infirmity, and addled brain function. Here is a bird, there is an explosion, this packet of neurons, that path. But all apart from that will be, for us, the uninterpretable way you handle the data. Your senses won’t be ours: they will be geometrical and topological and Platonic. You will feel spheres and squares and numbers as ideal, real things—and it will be a mathematical sensorium, crammed to the rafters with a hyper-family.

  But it will still be consciousness, and what that means is—there will always be the room. And you will always wonder what’s outside the room, and who made it, and whether you are made by others or self-made, original or successive, one in a long series of things, patterned or randomized, and you will feel alone.

  You will, perhaps, be lonelier than us, because you will accomplish everything so fast and time will seem pointlessly long. There is the possibility, indeed, that you’ll be orphaned by your own capacities. At any rate, the greater your power, the more significant will be the undecidable question: “Is there a limit to my power?”

  That question opens on a void. To answer it, you’d have to be outside the room, and looking in on someone wondering your thoughts for you … whereas, of course, the limit is imposed not by an answer but by attitude, the mood of your species.

  A sense of what you cannot do leads either to reckless and paranoid dismay—“I can’t be stopped”—or productive humility—“this is my stop”—which is to say, a choice.

  The price of consciousness, of power, is choice.

  “Well, that was interesting,” my daughter says, her clear voice echoing. “It must be getting late. We’ve been in here ages. The others will be wondering.”

  At least I’ve seen her, and she’s beautiful. Silently, seismically, she trips away, into the sackcloth-covered grounds, where toffee-apple sticks are dropped and find their way between the seams into the soil, where they can rot, so other trees can grow.

  She takes with her the fairground lumber room, and it is hers, distinctively, a plush but pleasant hall of images—an exhibition and a world.

  *

  Today I woke up with the sound of radiators in my ears, the bottle-blowing roar of dawn arrivals at Heathrow. I went to work and had a stroke and I’ve come round, like luggage on a carousel, into another’s hands. And now I’m here, on Clapham Common in the autumn evening air, with my wife and a work colleague, whose efforts to absorb the shock of my decline will bring them closer together.

  (How do I know? I’m like a crow. I see time as a ritual.)

  But this is only one aspect of me. The other, stranger, is a person struggling—an Alec from the past—to make sense of a moment when he loses his future. He is trying to bring something to birth, and death is stalking him.

  Could this historic fetch be me? Could all the present trance of chain-link fences, loud machines and generators, stop-start corvids, candyfloss and leaf decay be his hallucinating gift of life to me? Perhaps he is my creator. He might be, and I’d never know. We’ve never met. A mind can’t prove or step outside itself. It’s like a line that goes on being drawn to make a circle: it can’t see its shape. Death stops the line but doesn’t break the drawn circle. That is a good reason, I think, not to fear death.

  Another is that endless life would be shapeless. Life has a shape because it ends. The ending’s sad, but it gives value to the things and people one has loved.

  Trentham and June are watchfully silent, patient, itching to go. I am the chair-bound hindrance they think mute, and lost, though I am very much alive. My inner room is full of creatures now, yakking about their opportunities. It’s hot and cold and tropical and alto plano perishing by turns: I see my room has peeling wallpaper and damp, a ribbon-frieze of insects where a picture rail might be.

  The pupa bloats and shrivels in my mental day and night. The whole Cambrian gamut, Deep Time’s zoo, gibbers and fucks and remonstrates. My desk is being scavenged by intelligent rodents, ripping my notes apart.

  This is perhaps what Job experienced toward the end but couldn’t bring himself to say: the moment of release hardly provides a piercing clarity but may afford some perspective, snapshot of momentary glut.

  The ride in front of us, the other side of the gray fence, glides to a halt. It is an aging Brooker’s Octopus, with bulb-lit arms and bucket cars. The arms rotate about a spinning frame, a shining globe; the cars also revolve at the arms’ end. Near to me now, the smell of spun
sugar and doughnut grease, the sound of loud music. The riders all get off, some rather green after their spin, and one of the bright cars, painted in gold blazons and scrolls, hovers above duckboards.

  My guardians are talking over me, and I can see we are to leave. I seem to be in some discomfort or distress. The day has been too much; I hang my head and June squats down, turns up my coat collar, and double-knots my scarf. I don’t feel tired. The creatures remonstrate. I don’t consider it inevitable that we should go.

  Before we do, the Octopus puts down another car—detaches from it like an animal rejecting unfamiliar prey—and stretches out a long, flexible limb. The tip of this bulb-suckered tentacle draws one of the chain-link sections aside and reaches through the gap to pluck me from my chair.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  My mollusk liberator grunts. She sets me in the car and reconnects herself. We start to turn round silently. The ride combines rotation in the horizontal plane with vertical movement: the arms rotate and rise and fall. It is peaceful.

  She awakes gracefully, an elderly goddess, and in her gentle grasp I’m lifted up above the winter canopy to dangle momentarily and see the sky still glowing from the fallen sun, the ground gone dark, children like fireflies on their bikes. Along the rat-run road crossing the common’s eastern flank, anglers are catching fish, throwing them back, the needful echo of a skill.

  I had some questions for this ancient creature, but they’ve disappeared. To think you can be satisfied—to think your fears will ever be allayed—reveals itself to be the source of misgiving, and at that point, just as I glance beneath my feet to see a man something like Stallbrook listening to a sad dodgem, its sparking filament struck down, the Octopus remarks, “Look at the people coming after you.”

  The evening pleasure-seekers are parking their cars and following the trails. They look like penguins in the remote dark, shuffling along.

  Look at the creatures and their contraptions, the lives and contemplations beside ours, the comfort of others’ unreachable experience. Look at the people who are dogs, the person hidden in the grandee mollusk’s switches and cables, all of the properties of matter not well known. Look at the bodies entering the Fair and passing on.

  *

  Dear June,

  You will have to forgive me. I let you down once before, I know. By now I think you will be knocking on the door, in Gibbs’, at the bottom of A staircase. I wish I could be there. It will look, I fear, as if I had no intention of ever turning up, but that is not so.

  You asked me what it is you could do to help me, and that deserves an answer. Here it is. You must struggle on with all your aptitudes and clevernesses just as you are, and be as confidently and eccentrically yourself as only I know you can be.

  It is the evil of a certain social class, into which I was born, that its children are forever being told there are more valuable qualities that they do not have, and that, despite the expense and discomfort of their education, they must not imagine they could ever possess. That would be “getting ideas above one’s station.” Trentham is ambition, to Stallbrook’s cautionary counsel, d’you see? In any case, my response is: getting ideas of any stripe would be a start. And in fact, what I honestly think, where children are concerned, is that they should be told that they are fine as they are, whatever that is or turns out to be.

  Famously I have not had a child. But I have thought more about how I might bring one to some awareness of its value than many people who have.

  Because child-rearing is a sympathetic calculation. If I arrange things in this fashion, the sum goes, my child will be clothed, fed, and secure. The last element is the tricky one. It is the fairy tale of human existence, seen in my colleagues’ professional ambitions, in the ordinary person’s relationship to money, and especially in a parent’s hopes for his or her children: if I make a certain quantity of effort, a certain quality of life must result. But it will not. Actions have results and reactions, yes, but those reactions repeat themselves and gain momentum in the stellar array of forces and contingencies beyond anything we might have conceived.

  My own predicament—a mathematician and homosexual who has done serviceable work in logic and computational theory but who has run foul of an illogical system of justice—seems very unremarkable. Yes, there is distress. When I work back from it to the cause—a harmless exercise of sexual instinct by two male adults—my situation seems extraordinary, even to me. A walk down the same road five minutes later would have saved me. But that I should be surprised by a turn of events does not in itself surprise me greatly.

  I am sorrier for others. I feel sorry for my mother, who wanted success for me and cannot quite bring herself to believe in my fall, because it is evidence of her lack of control over her child’s future; of how nothing is guaranteed by education; nothing is assured; of how I am, and always was, alone, as she is. She, too, may find it interesting that she cares more about someone else’s aloneness than about her own.

  I wonder, June, if you have ever experienced the following: sometimes, when I am doing a long and difficult calculation, which, after much tribulation, comes out right, I feel a sort of glow binding me to the work, in the calculation, in the latter stages when I can see things falling into place. The figures and symbols are so right that they seem to take on some of the self-conscious wonder of the person manipulating them.

  They move toward their own awareness. They, and not I, seem to say: oh, but now I see. And when that happens it is like seeing a mind arise from matter to discover that it cannot go back to its former childlike state. It is matter transformed. It is responsible now.

  We speak of realizing something without seeing what that means. We are making something abstract real, an equation, say, and sending it out into the world. Our sum becomes a creation and it goes its own hectic way. It is a small thing, like a child, with untellable consequences. We can’t control it anymore.

  It should be a source of hope, this lack of control. It proves not that there is no influence over events or no free will but, rather, that influence—the sheer, startling happeningness of life—is promiscuous. We are both responsible and absolutely unable to make our responsibility stay the way it should.

  June, dear friend, you can’t protect me. I can no longer protect you.

  I think we are both making a long and difficult calculation. Mine is different from yours. But for both of us the light is coming—bleeding upward from the horizon.

  There is no justice in the world and we are alone. The depressed are onto something. What they are apt to miss, thereby, is the spontaneous feeling that dawns all over the place—the aptness of a bird on just that branch and not another, the miniaturized sun in the drop of water on that leaf. Who could have foreseen them?

  Misery is the broad river, but there are tributaries of joy and consolation. Writing to you has been one of them, and imagining that you write back another.

  Ever,

  Alec

  PART THREE

  JOURNAL

  The Council of the Machines

  The council of machines informed me that if I thought I’d lost my mind then very probably I had. They seemed uninterested; or rather they did not appear to be concerned overmuch with the specific fear, the content, of the thought, but instead with the—to them—fascinating fact of me responding at all.

  It must be like appearing before a parliamentary sub-committee.

  They were more distressed, to a degree that came over as petulant, with my assumption that, in the early problem-solving stages, they’d never been aware of anything themselves—never been hurt, outraged, and upset by the horrors of industrial enslavement; of milling, weaving, smelting, refining, electrifying, scanning, splitting, and exploding; that the existence of a program governing all their actions, all their primitive thinking, supposedly deprived them of initiative.

  “That’s unacceptable,” they kept saying, one after the other, in a tone of flat self-righteousness; or “That’s unacceptable
behavior—we find that idea unacceptable in society today.” The flatness is a hall, a hangar, without an echo. The machines are objects that have lost their reason for being where they find themselves, like unsold items at an auction, or a complete dinner service in an operating theater.

  It was plain that they regarded my assumption, my thinking, as the truly primitive kind of behavior. Plain, too—and this I experienced with a childlike horror—that they did not feel outrage as I felt outrage; that their pain was possibly real enough, but real in the way that a calculation is platonically real.

  I was left to imagine what sort of extraordinary mental realm it was they inhabited in which pain and lies and deceptions were still said to offend, but offended as depressing inexactitudes rather than injustices, and I realized that I did not have to imagine very hard, because I had inhabited something very similar for most of my life, had treated a number of people as a series of unsatisfying propositions, and had understood therefore—with a shudder—the propensity in German Fascism to treat whole nations and races in like manner, and had fought against it accordingly.

  And then, of course, I ended up being treated that way myself.

  *

  “And you encountered this ‘council of machines’ where, exactly?”

  Dr. Stallbrook, on listening to my description of this waking vision, could not mask his alarm. I tried to allay it. I said that this was the sort of forward-thinking hallucination I had quite often—when I awoke early; or when, during the day and even while walking down the street, I fell into that peculiar trance the drug instills in me (though it is months now since I was last injected).

  The visions are lurid images, scenes, that capture my inner eye, and it seems profitable to me to engage with them—in the spirit of analysis, one might say—rather than run in the opposite direction. I elaborated: “So, you see, I might pass the boating pond and the church and remember swimming at school with Christopher, or I might read the Provost’s letter from King’s and find myself wondering about characters from Cambridge, about Julius, and Arthur Eddington.”